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The Kennedy Obsession

The American Myth of JFK

John Hellmann author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Columbia University Press

Published:30th Oct '97

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Kennedy Obsession cover

John F. Kennedy was not only a president, but also a symbol for America's most cherished ideas. Not the history of a man's life but the biography of his idea, The Kennedy Obsession traces the creation of Kennedy's image as an inspired-and inspiring-fiction.

John F. Kennedy was not only a president, but also a symbol for America's most cherished ideas. In The Kennedy Obsession, John Hellmann takes a thoroughly original approach to understanding Kennedy's star power and his carefully crafted public image. Tracing Kennedy's self-creation as diligent scholar, bashful hero, and sensitive rebel-cued by cultural figures such as Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, and Cary Grant-and the images of Kennedy in the aftermath of his assassination, Hellmann reveals the painstaking transformation of private life into public persona, of a man into perhaps the major American myth of our time.

Hellmann understands that reading involves more than the consumption of ideas--it is a theater of the mind, in which the reader imaginatively tests a range of roles, voices, identities. Hellmann shows how Kennedy's own early reading (in combination with family lore) provided him with the language of myth, his sense of identity and role. He then analyzes the complex ways in which this private myth-making interacted with the process of social myth-making (in mass media and politics) to shape 'The Kennedy Obsession.' -- Richard Slotkin American University

ISBN: 9780231107983

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

224 pages